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Bernie Sanders is a gruff, 74-year-old senator from a small state. He doesn't exactly exude charisma. Yet young voters are drawn to him, making the career politician a serious challenger for the Democratic nomination for president.

Part of the reason for his popularity: he embraces socialism.

"[R]esearch shows that young people are much more likely to support socialism than older people," NPR writes this week. "A May study from the market research firm YouGov found that 26 percent of people between the ages of 18-39 have a favorable opinion of socialism, compared to only 15 percent of people over 65. The Pew Research Center has also found that almost half of people between the ages of 18-49 view socialism favorably."

This isn't especially surprising. An enduring quote -- attributed, falsely, to Winston Churchill -- sums up the ideological journey for many people: "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

When we're young, we're idealistic. We see the world the way it should be, and we rage at injustice. Then we get older, gain some experience, and realize that man's (and woman's) best intentions sometimes produce the worst results.

But the mindset is a little different for today's 20-somethings than it was for past generations. It's not just idealism that fuels young Americans' passion for socialism. It's the Great Recession, which defined their views of capitalism.

"Older millennials that graduated from college or got into the workforce in the late 2000s really had a hard time believing in American Dreams and capitalism," Kei Kawashima Ginsberg told NPR. Kawashima-Ginsburg is the director of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

With the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Enron's collapse and Wall Street banks deemed too big to fail (just to name a few prominent examples from recent years), many young Americans came to view the capitalist system as inherently corrupt and unfair. Socialism promised something different, something bigger than the win-at-all-costs fight for money.

"I think of people working toward the common good," a George Mason University student told a reporter when asked what socialism meant to her. That response is relatively common among educated Americans in their 20s.

Baby Boomers and even Gen Xers, on the other hand, still remember the Soviet Union, and so they associate socialism with the bad guys from the Cold War, with dreary cities, bread lines and political oppression. Millennials only know the Cold War from history textbooks; they associate socialism with democratic Western European countries that have single-payer health-care systems and generous government-provided pension plans, and where people generally still seem happy and prosperous despite economic struggles in recent years.

All of this suggests that the 2016 presidential election might pit young voters against older voters more than is usual. The Pew Research Center found in 2011 that socialism remains a "divisive word" in the U.S., "with wide differences of opinion along racial, generational, socioeconomic and political lines."